David Eagleman Quotes

How can you see something that isn't there?" yawned the Humbug, who wasn't fully awake yet. "Sometimes, it's much simpler than seeing things that are,"he said. "For instance, if something is there, you can only see it with your eyes open, but if it isn't there, you can see it just as well with your eyes closed. That's why imaginary things are often easier to see than real ones." "Then where is Reality?" barked Tock. "Right here,"cried Alec, waving his arms.

There is but one world common for those who are awake, but when men are asleep, each turns away into a world of his own.

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.

As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.

Every morning we awaken from sleep and from our dreams and enter the state we call wakefulness. A continuous stream of thoughts, most of them repetitive, characterizes the normal wakeful state.

The difference between closing or opening your eyes is the choice between the imagined vs real. Blinking is only human.

When you sleep, your dream world is as real to you as life, isn’t it?

Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream

And as well as I dream, I reason if I want, for that's just another kind of dream.

We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.

Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.

The mind was dreaming. The world was its dream.

The senses collect the surface facts of matter... It was sensation; when memory came, it was experience; when mind acted, it was knowledge; when mind acted on it as knowledge, it was thought.

One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

That which is not present in deep dreamless sleep is not real

From birth to death man is a long sleep, sometimes dreaming with eyes closed, sometimes dreaming with eyes open, but dreaming all the same, all the time.

Dreams aren't memories," he says.

"Well, it's no use your talking about waking him," said Tweedledum, "when you're only one of the things in his dream. You know very well you're not real."

Consciousness is a sea ringed with visions.

Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one's consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.

May we not then sometimes define insanity as an inability to distinguish which is the waking and which the sleeping life? We often dream without the least suspicion of unreality: 'Sleep hath its own world', and it is often as lifelike as the other.

Everything is a reenactment. We are reenacting the world in the mind. The world is not inside there. It does not reside in the gray matter of the brain.

It seems to me that the real problem is the mind itself and not the problem which the mind has created and tries to solve.